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Romney Can’t Rumble

Mitt Romney just doesn’t know how to rumble. It comes across as more of a fumble. Sometimes a mumble. And ultimately a stumble.

The man is terrible when he’s on the attack. He looked utterly uncomfortable with confrontation, like someone running into a machete melee brandishing a paté knife.

Monday night, Romney needed to take Gingrich down a peg or two and remind the Republican voters of Florida and the rest of America that he is their best chance of being competitive with Barack Obama. He failed. He just doesn’t have it in him.

But that didn’t stop him from trying. Romney opened the debate doing his best. For one, he attacked Gingrich for his role as an “influence peddler” for Freddie Mac. The message could have worked, were it not for the messenger. Romney simply couldn’t deliver the lines in a way that felt natural.

Gingrich, anticipating an attack, shifted his persona from the heinous Mr. Hyde to a somewhat jocular Dr. Jekyll. Gingrich actually managed a degree of front-runner’s magnanimity. He is a chameleon. This only made Romney’s feeble attacks appear all the more feeble.

And Gingrich knows Romney’s weakness. He squirms like a worm on a hook whenever someone points out his wealth.

In the middle of Romney’s attack, Gingrich went right for it:

Gingrich: What’s the gross revenue of Bain in the years you were associated with it? What’s the gross revenue?

Romney, stammering a bit: Very substantial. But I think it’s irrelevant compared with the fact you were working for Freddie Mac.

Gingrich, to audible chuckles from the otherwise quiet crowd: Wait a minute. Very substantial?

“Very substantial” is just the kind of non-answer answer that makes people suspicious. It’s not that he doesn’t know, but that he doesn’t want to tell. In the same vein, Romney is constantly “not apologizing” for getting filthy rich by buying companies and putting them through a wood chipper. His non-apologies reek of guilt and shame, which in turn puts people’s antenna up. Something is amiss.

When Brian Williams, the debate’s moderator, asked Romney if there would be any surprises in his tax returns Romney said:

But I paid all the taxes that are legally required and not a dollar more. I don’t think you want someone as the candidate for president who pays more taxes than he owes.… You’ll see my income, how much taxes I’ve paid, how much I’ve paid to charity. You’ll see how complicated taxes can be. And will there will discussion? Sure. Will it be an article? Yeah. But is it entirely legal and fair? Absolutely. I’m proud of the fact that I pay a lot of taxes.

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I don’t know about you, but that sounds to me like an awful lot of foot shuffling for an answer to such a simple question. Romney’s awkward answers about his money are invariably more damaging than the question would have suggested.

Very late Monday night Romney released his tax returns for 2010 and his estimated tax returns for 2011 — all 550 pages of them. That’s an entire ream of paper, plus some. According to The Times, Romney had a total income of $45 million for the two years, and, according to The Washington Post, his effective taxes rates were nearly 14 percent and 15.4 percent in 2010 and 2011, respectively.

So: Romney can’t attack and can’t defend. That could prove his undoing.

Romney has all the advantages – the money, the organization, the backing of most of the Republican establishment – but none of the grit. And that’s what he needs and must muster. He already has a huge hurdle with many conservatives who view him with distrust, if not outright disgust, and who have spent the entire campaign season searching for his replacement.

Since South Carolina, they are taking a shine to Gingrich, again. According to a Monday report from Gallup:

Newt Gingrich has all but erased Mitt Romney’s 23-percentage-point lead of a week ago among Republican voters nationally, and the two candidates are now essentially tied, at 29% for Romney and 28% for Gingrich.

If Gingrich maintains his momentum — Newtmentum as it has come to be called online — and wins the Florida primary, it will be hard for Romney to continue to make the case to his own supporters, let alone the rest of Republican America, that he should be their David to the Obama campaign Goliath.

Romney’s strongest selling point had been that he was the most electable, that he was the Republican candidate who would be most able to attract the moderate, independent voters that it would take to win in November. But that argument falls apart if you can’t even attract your own party’s voters.

Mr. Milquetoast and his waffles don’t appeal to red-meat Republicans. They want a fighter, not a fumbler.

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Weekly pieces by the Op-Ed columnists Charles Blow and Ross Douthat, as well as regular posts from contributing writers like Thomas B. Edsall and Timothy Egan. This is also the place for opinionated political thinkers from all over the United States to make their arguments about everything connected to the 2012 election. Yes, everything: the candidates, the states, the caucuses, the issues, the rules, the controversies, the primaries, the ads, the electorate, the present, the past and even the future.